A Great Translator Takes on One Final and Nearly Impossible Project

In 1970, the German writer Arno Schmidt published his magnum opus, a novel called “Zettel’s Traum.” Its narrator is Dan Pagenstecher, an aging writer who lives in the fictional village of Ödingen and is an expert on Edgar Allan Poe. Dan is visited by a married couple, Paul and Wilma Jacobi, who are translating Poe into German. They have come seeking Dan’s expertise on Poe, and they have brought along their sixteen-year-old daughter, Franziska. She and Dan flirt intensely. The novel, which takes place over twenty-four hours, consists mostly of conversations between the characters. It is thirteen hundred and thirty-four pages long.

Schmidt, who was born in Hamburg in 1914, to a policeman father and a mother who would one day urge her son to “quit the whole writing thing” (she thought science suited him better), was a contrarian at heart. Many of his short stories, novellas, and novels are narrated by polymathic men who loathe organized religion, think having children is stupid, and hold authority in contempt (“A decent person is ashamed of being a boss !”). Their voices are electric with intellect and libido—flashes of light in a landscape darkened by human folly and destruction. Schmidt was drafted at the beginning of the Second World War, and was later taken captive by the British; upon the war’s end, he became a refugee. His fiction is frequently set in Germany during the war and in its aftermath, an ashen land of the lost and the displaced. “What I trust most are the beauties of nature,” one narrator says. “Then books; then roast with sauerkraut. All else changes, legerdemains.”

“Zettel’s Traum” is both Schmidt’s most famous book and his least read, and for the same reason: it is dedicated almost entirely to applying a Freudian theory of language to the works of Poe. (This was familiar ground: Schmidt spent years translating Poe, in collaboration with Hans Wollschläger.) Dan argues that words are composed of units of sound, or “etyms,” that reveal an author or speaker’s unconscious thoughts. To say “whole” is to think “hole,” for instance. With his ear cocked to sexual harmonics, Dan finds in Poe an impotent man who is possessed by the erotic and, unable to express his sexuality in bed, resorts to voyeurism, notably of what people do on the toilet.

In other books, these etyms are hidden, and must be found by a careful reader. But in “Zettel’s Traum” they are brought much closer to the surface, often emerging into full view. Aeronauten (aeronauts) is written as Ero’naughties, faculty as fuckculty, and fixen (fixed) as fickSn, playing off ficken, or “fuck” in German. Franziska’s Plisseerock (pleated skirt) becomes Pleas’see=Rock. Schmidt violates the rules of orthography and punctuation throughout the book, and its sprawling conversations cover James Joyce, trees, magic, the moon, and Xerxes, among many other things. After getting “Zettel’s Traum” out of his system, Schmidt would go on to write his best works. “I had to write it,” he said. “And such a book had to be written sometime.”

Late last year, I went to see the translator John E. Woods at his apartment in Berlin. Woods, who is in his seventies, has received numerous awards for his work; all that stood between him and retirement was “Zettel’s Traum.” Woods is perhaps best known for his translations of Thomas Mann’s major novels, but Schmidt’s fiction has been the backbone of his career. The first translation he published, in 1980, was Schmidt’s novel “Evening Edged in Gold.” Now Woods was tackling the big one. During my visit, Woods took down the German edition of “Zettel’s Traum” from his shelf with a groan—the torso-size thing weighs eighteen pounds. (Schmidt superfans buy lecterns to read it.) We sat with the novel open between us on the couch, and pages from his translation, composed in the course of ten years, scattered across our laps.

Each page of the novel measures eleven by fourteen inches and features three columns of text. The center is the widest: it relays the main narrative, unfolding in Ödingen. To the left are quotations from the works of Poe; text from the center column extends leftward when the characters quote or discuss the writer. On the right side are marginalia from diverse sources, such as dictionaries and recipe books. No typesetter had the technological means to exactly reproduce Schmidt’s design, so the writer simply published a photo-offset of his typewritten pages, which remained generously pockmarked by his cross-outs and edits.

“One could not tell if this was amazing, or if this was something for crazy people,” Susanne Fischer, the head of the Arno Schmidt Foundation, which manages the writer’s literary estate, told me. In the past few years, Schmidt has been increasingly recognized among critics and scholars as a radically idiosyncratic voice in postwar German literature, but Fischer and her colleagues at the foundation believe there is still work to be done. In 2010, the foundation released a typeset edition of “Zettel’s Traum,” removing the bar to entry for those who balked at the draft-like feel of the photo-offset. Woods’s English translation, “Bottom’s Dream,” published this fall by Dalkey Archive Press, is the latest effort to bring Schmidt to a wider audience.

At his apartment, Woods guided me through his translation of a page in which Dan and Franziska (also called Fränzel, or “Friendsel,” by Dan, the etym-hunter) have rejoined the others after spending some time alone. Wilma is growing suspicious about what’s going on between them; meanwhile, a zeppelin passes overhead. Here is an excerpt:

First, the punctuation. Guillemets, those double arrows, encase speech; parentheses enclose stage directions, more or less. Beyond that, there are no firm rules. When punctuation marks are put in a series (“ – : ? – ”, for instance), their shapes can be interpreted visually. Schmidt explained it like so: “When I write : , the out=come … is that the colon becomes the inquiring opened face, the question mark the torsion of the body turned to ask, and the whole of ‘The Question’ retains its validity.” He also abbreviates names into letters (P = Paul) and, when rendering dialogue, is faithful to the smudged noises that people actually make (’t’s = what’s).

In the scene above, Wilma eyes Franziska’s new necklace, given to her by Dan. She then eyes—with the help of binoculars, the voyeur’s favorite toy—a zeppelin branded with "GROTJOHANN_,_" or “bigjohn,” which Woods says is a penis reference. All is musky with sex. In the last line, you can see Woods following Schmidt’s lead by switching out letters for their phonic cousins of S or D (iD = it), or, more simply, capitalizing S or D in the “wrong” places (waS = was). According to Woods, S represents the “constant drumming” of the words “sex” and “sexual,” and refers to Freud’s concept of Es (the id). The meaning of D is less clear; Woods said that it could refer to Dan.

Many of Schmidt’s visual or acoustic puns defy English translation. For example, Schmidt turns the German word “falls”—“in the case of”—into “phalls,” exposing the etym that brings “phallic” to mind. Woods did not see a way to reproduce this move in English. To compensate for such losses, he created numerous puns that do not appear in the original German—changing folgn (short for folgen, or “follow”) to phollo, for instance, and thus hewing to Schmidt’s ph– twist. In the passage quoted above, Woods translated neidisch as jellously, rather than the literal “jealous,” in order to evoke “jelly” and “louse” (Wilma is overweight and unpleasant). He changed bei=drehte to turned ass=side to accentuate “ass” as much as possible.

Corresponding with Woods by e-mail, I tried my hand at uncovering an etym. Woods, I surmised, had rendered the translation of the German word “etwas” as “slitely,” rather than “slightly,” to make the word look svelte, like the neck it describes. “That’s a lovely idea,” he told me. “It shows you’re thinking in Schmidtian terms.” But he chose slitely simply out of preference to “somewhat,” he said, and he cut the gh in words like “slightly” throughout the book in order to rough up the text, as Schmidt had. But regardless of his intention, Woods said, my reading was neither right nor wrong—it was one of many valid possibilities.

“The nirvana of what I do is to capture for an English-speaking reader, let’s hope, most of the aesthetic and intellectual charm, delight, and beauty of the original,” Woods said. “More, I can’t do.” The impossibility of perfect translation is what grants him creative license. When Woods exposes an etym where there seems to be none in the German, he believes he is “in no way debasing or exaggerating this facet of Schmidt’s prose.” (Woods has the advantage that English and German “share etyms with a common heritage.” A proper translation of Schmidt into Finnish or Thai would be far more difficult.) To re-create the feeling of the landscape, Woods must re-lay the bricks of every street—hence his indignation, when reviews of his translations praise the author’s prose as if it were not his as well.

Schmidt can be hard on the eyes. Last December, a mostly older audience gathered at the Academy of Arts, in Berlin, to hear Woods read from his translation. He sat onstage beside a giant projector screen featuring two pages from the original German. A ricochet of cries: “The writing is too small!” “Can you make it bigger?” One woman suggested using a laser pointer to follow the text, word by word, in tandem with the reading of the English version. Then, somewhere from the audience: “I found my glasses!”

Schmidt did not like to be distracted. In 1955, after publishing the novella “Lake Scenery with Pocahontas,” he was charged with blasphemy and pornography, then still crimes in certain Catholic regions of Germany. He escaped to the city of Darmstadt, which was less religiously oppressive (the charges were eventually dropped). Soon enough, Schmidt decided that Darmstadt was too big and too busy, and that its literary scene was a “repulsive, clique-ridden operation.” Allergic to fools and massively ambitious, he decided to settle in Bargfeld, a tiny village in Lower Saxony that offered “absolute silence” and “no church(!).” He and his wife moved there in 1958.

It was there that Schmidt threw himself into “Zettel’s Traum.” “Complete neglect of his own health,” his wife, Alice, reported. “Complete indifference to everything that is unrelated to ZT.” Each night, at 2 A.M., he would begin writing in the upstairs room, from which even his cats were barred (not least because the one he called Conte Fosco, after a Wilkie Collins character, had urinated on his prized edition of James Fenimore Cooper). He compiled roughly a hundred and twenty thousand scraps of paper, or Zettel, in shallow wooden boxes, which he spread out on his desk. On each Zettel, there was written a bit of dialogue or sexual wordplay (“Im=pussy=bell’–!”) or a literary quote rerouted through his one-track mind (“the fleshy man=drake’s stem. / That shrieks, when torn at night”). After twenty-five thousand hours of knitting the pieces together, Schmidt handed the manuscript to his publisher in a large cardboard box tied with a curtain sash.

The title “Zettel’s Traum” is drawn from a German translation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The last name of the weaver, Nick Bottom, was changed to Zettel, which not only means a slip of paper but also the warp used in weaving. If “Zettel’s Traum” is a tapestry, then _Zettel_s are its Zettel. For his translation of the title, Woods reverted to Shakespeare’s original name, which, he pointed out, carries its own puns: “bottom” can mean buttocks, which can be rendered in German as Popo, a phonetic echo of “Poe.”

Schmidt’s life in Bargfeld marked a retreat away from the world and into his imagination. For once, he did not feel the need to escape. Today, the cottage where he wrote the novel remains largely unchanged. His green leather jacket hangs in the foyer, as if it might be taken for another walk through Bargfeld’s silent, birch-framed fields. Books line the walls of his study in their original order. The page-a-day calendar in the kitchen still shows May 31st, the date, in 1979, that Schmidt suffered the stroke that would lead to his death, three days later. Just next door is the home of the Arno Schmidt Foundation, where a portrait in the foyer shows the writer with a pair of binoculars hanging around his neck—still watching, or leering. Every night, people who work there drive home to towns livelier than Bargfeld, but Schmidt stays in the village, steps away from his old house, under a boulder that serves as his headstone.

Under the southern portion of the city exists its negative image: a network of more than two hundred miles of galleries, rooms, and chambers.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.